VIDEO: Rethinking The Customer Experience

Organisations should improve their customer experience if they want to survive in an increasingly competitive business environment, experts say.

In a panel discussion during the CIO Year Ahead event moderated by CIO Africa Chief Editor Carol Odero, Claire Munene, Customer Experience Director at Telekom Kenya, Trevoh Kimenye Co-founder of Ongair, Devine Muraijimana, noted that Covid-19 elevated the increasing need for organisations to provide better customer experience.

During the pandemic, most organisations changed their business models to adjust to the changing times. They turned to digital platforms to continue offering products and services to customers and this came with new expectations and demands.

To meet the demands of customers, the experts urged businesses not to make customer experience a company-wide effort.

“Most of the time we find ourselves into these operational silos and most people who tend to care about customer experience are in the communication, marketing, customer segment. I don’t think that’s right. We should aspire to have customer-centric organisations where everybody believes experience is the most important thing,” Trevoh said.

Claire described a delightful customer experience as that which “allows a customer to seamlessly access and do what is meaningful for them through an organisations product, service, and leave them feeling happy about it”.

Devine noted that customers’ needs are divergent and they are becoming much more so. “Customers are demanding better experiences; they want more integrated experiences. The only way to delight the customer is meet them where they need you the most. This could be anything behind where they interact with your product or where they interact with your business development people or the customer experience team. You need to design the interaction in such a way that you understand their needs,”

As organisations turn to the latest technology such as AI to deal with customer management, the experts urged organisations not to forget the important role of the human touch in the process.

“We have been so isolated for the last two years, sometimes dealing with bots can be frustrating. Technology doesn’t exist in an abstract world. You have to look at the motivations of your customers and what they are experiencing at that time. There are flaws that are best handled by a human being and those that are well handled by automation,” Trevoh said.

Watch the video here